Portside

Reviewing the new book by Christopher Rufo, architect of the right’s crusade against “critical race theory.”

In the popular imagination, vegan school lunch may seem like the exclusive provenance of big cities like New York, but the tide appears to have shifted significantly in much of the country.

This approach to period pieces does not only erase historical racism and homophobia. It also erases our joy. Accurate historical representation and less trauma in stories about marginalized people are not opposing goals.

Chicago poet Carol Kanter offers a poem of peace, an alternative to “rage…offense…”

Reviewer Pele says author Mbembe defines “necropolitics” “as the political making of spaces and subjectivities in an in-between of life and death.” Necropolitical practices have their origins in colonialism and the slave plantation.

In Wonka, Timothée Chalamet dons the eccentric chocolatier’s purple jacket in yet another film adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This one is playful and harmless, but it can’t touch the 1971 original movie.

Under the new visa pilot program, the administration is prioritizing growers’ profits over farmworkers’ rights.

In Maestro, Bradley Cooper plays famed conductor Leonard Bernstein but leaves out the complicating — and fascinating — real-life details for a more streamlined, tearjerking product. It’ll doubtlessly do well at the Oscars.

Based on a true story, Lita Kurth exposes the risk and dangers of an all-night job.

This book explores how social identities of various kinds have spurred the divisiveness of our politics, and how politics has itself become a kind of social identity.